HIV in World Cultures

Three Decades of Representations

Gustavo Subero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409453987
• eBook ISBN: 9781317121534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses the way that HIV/AIDS is often narrativised and represented in contemporary world cultures, as well as the different strategies of remembrance deployed by different (sub)cultural groups affected by the illness. Through a close study of a variety of cultural texts; including cinema, literature, theatre, art and photography amongst others, it demonstrates the trajectory that such narratives and representations have undergone since the advent of the 'discovery' of the disease in the 1980s. Acknowledging the central - yet often overlooked - role that cultural products have played in the construction of public opinion towards the condition itself and those who suffer it, this ground-breaking volume focuses on a variety of narratives, as well as strategies of coping with HIV/AIDS that have emerged across the globe. Bringing together research on the UK, North and South America, Africa and China, it provides rich textual analyses of the ways in which the HIV positive body has been portrayed in contemporary culture, with attention to the differences between specific national contexts, whilst keeping in view a space of commonality amongst the different experiences reflected in such texts. As such, it will be of interest to social scientists and scholars of cultural and media studies, concerned with cultural production and representations of the body and sickness.

Chapter 1
Canadian Literary Representations of HIV/AIDS

Shoshannah Ganz

While this study is an attempt to look at the Canadian literary representations of AIDS, the starting point for this discussion will be a more generalized discussion of AIDS art and the representational politics of AIDS literature and art. According to James Miller “[p]redictably, most AIDS fiction functions like the usual kinds of AIDS art – as instruction, memorial, or commodity” (1992: 266). However, other theorists focusing on the metaphorical usage of disease in art, such as Brian Patton – building on the work of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and its Metaphors (1989) – argue that the predominant metaphor for HIV/AIDS is military: the immune system is seen to be at war (274-275). The artists, writers, and particularly activists in the AIDS crisis have, likewise, seen their work to be engaged in a fight – one whose object is more than instruction or memorial, although both are certainly a part of the work. An unnamed AIDS activist at the 2010 Mexico City Human Rights Commission AIDS conference put it simply as “at the beginning we were just fighting for the right to bury our dead” (December 2010). It is not surprising then, that the films of the 1990s, collectively called New Queer Cinema, are characterized by what Michele Aaron describes as “defiance” (2004: 3) – works that are “unapologetic about their characters’ faults” and “defy the sanctity of the past” (4). And while Peggy Phelan sees “interrogation of causality” – what is the cause of homosexuality and AIDS? – as the central question of works such as Silverlake Life (1997: 159), Gabriele Griffin’s Representations of HIV and AIDS: Visibility Blue/s (2000) focuses on “why HIV/AIDS, a visually under-determined illness, surfaced in visually over-determined media (film, theatre, photography, poster campaigns, art)” (17). In fact, campaign and art projects like the one started by three Canadian artists in New York, who took the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome acronym AIDS and rearranged and proliferated this logo to resemble the similar LOVE logo (Imagevirus 2010: 1), seem to be forcing everyone to both see AIDS and identify the disease with the most elevated of human emotions and one that, while invisible, can infect everyone. According to Gregg Bordowitz “[t]urning LOVE into AIDS seems to draw some kind of causal connection between a powerful human emotion and a deadly disease” – this symbol exploded and proliferated – like the virus itself to combat the “reinvigorated deep-seated homophobia” (2010: 1-2).

The Canadian literary scene did not explode with proliferating representations of AIDS like the AIDS logo of the previous discussion. In fact, to date there are very few Canadian novels that deal to any great extent with people living with or dying from HIV/AIDS, and it is this very lack of proliferation of Canadian AIDS literature that constitutes one of the secondary questions of this chapter. The answer reaches almost certainly beyond the scope of a literary study and into the realm of cautious cultural speculation. The primary intent of this study is to explore four novels: Elizabeth Hay’s The Only Snow in Havana (1992), Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) and, to a lesser extent, Timothy Findley’s Headhunter (1993) and Nino Ricci’s The Origin of the Species (2008). All of these texts are set in the pre-treatment era of HIV/AIDS – the 1980s – and the characters living with HIV/AIDS therefore all face an unknown future with certain death and generalized cultural fear and prejudice. In both Hay and Highway’s contemporary Canadian texts, the first-person narrator becomes witness to the life and death of a close friend or relative who has contracted HIV/AIDS. This chapter discusses how the narrator negotiates the ‘unnamable’, ‘unknowable’, and ‘unseen’ characteristics and qualities of AIDS, and how visual art is created by the character with AIDS in the text and survives both the disease and the death of the AIDS artist. Likewise, AIDS art becomes a liminal space from which to explore other cultural and historical uncertainties. The story of HIV/AIDS and the resultant art will be shown to connect with other discourses of the ‘unnamable’ and unknown in Canadian culture, including the threats posed by the United States – regarded as a virus that could erase Canadian culture and identity; the spread of other humanmade ‘diseases’; the disaster posed by plastic production and pollution, as well as the annihilation of native peoples and culture. Above all, these texts explore the ontological uncertainty of living and creating in the liminality between life with HIV and the coming deterioration resulting from AIDS, and the relational, artistic, cultural, environmental and historical discourse facilitated by memorializing through story the Canadian HIV/AIDS experience in the pre-treatment era.

Elizabeth Hay’s The Only Snow in Havana is described on the back cover as “[b]lending memoir, biography, travel writing and history”. As such, and as characteristic of all four genres, there is an assumption that the writing is the record of something that has happened in real time to an historical person. The blending of these genres underscores the fluidity of these genres, the text and writing, and also underscores what I will eventually describe as the fluidity of the art of disease and, particularly in this case, AIDS art.

The Only Snow in Havana opens in both contradiction and fluidity. Hay writes: “North elides into south” (3) and “Two avocados ripened on top of the fridge, two cold sores blossomed on my lips” (3). The Northern narrator of the text meets the Southern traveler to Mexico, and, signaled by the word “elides”, slides from the frozen North into the melting South. The change of states is important to this image. Likewise, the southern fruit/vegetable of the avocado – itself in an uncertain state – ripens on the fridge, a place of preservation of a particular state, but the avocado is outside of and on top of this mechanical stasis. The “cold sores blossomed” is significant in its immediate signal of viral unpredictability but unexpected in the pairing of disease and contamination – and specifically, sexual disease – with the rebirth and beauty implied in blossoming. These seemingly strange juxtapositions signal immediately the author’s intention of exploring the ‘state inbetween’, or the liminal nature of viral disease, and the possibility of beauty and art “blossoming” from virus. It is interesting to note that Hay pairs herself and the first person narrator with a sexual virus and art; she claims the cold sores to be “blossoming” on “my lips” (3). Further, the following and third paragraph of the text explores identity and the fluidity of identity. It seems both intentional and significant that the discussion of the author/narrator’s identity directly follows the claiming of personal virus and the resulting beauty of the “cold sores blossom[ing] on my lips” (3).

The majority of The Only Snow in Havana meditates on the uncertainties of the self and Canadian identity, sometimes in relation to the people of the culturallydefining land mass that separates Canada from Mexico (that is, The United States of America). Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966) in a similarly oblique manner reflects on the victimization of Canada by the United States. Peter Wilkin, building on Linda Hutcheon’s claim that “Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers allegorizes Canada’s historical-political situation”, extrapolates that “Anglophones and francophones, according to this logic, are both victims and oppressors, while the Indians are simply victims and the Americans are simply oppressors” (1966: 1). The oppression by America is one that threatens to annihilate Canadian culture through the unilateral obliteration of cultural differences. In the final scene of the text, the narrator I, who has morphed into F, is swallowed and consumed by an American film star, thus completely engulfing every version of Canadian identity that the narrator has studied, meditated on and eventually become. Responding to the consuming culture of the United States, perhaps itself a metaphor for ravaging disease and HIV/AIDS, is one of the ongoing narrative strands of the Elizabeth Hay text. The story deals with the American takeover and destruction of culture and acts to destabilize the history and cultures of both Mexico and Canada, yet the response is very different on the part of the two countries. For Canadians the response appears to be a loss of self and a forgetting of history (just as it is represented in the Leonard Cohen novel); perhaps a mirror for the Canadian cultural response to AIDS, a forgetting of the history of AIDS in Canada and an erasure of the stories of Canadians with AIDS through a gaping hole in the majority of Canadian fiction. While the military metaphor for AIDS seems justifiably resonant in the American context, Canadian identity is keyed to its role as a ‘peace keeper’ and thus the arguably predominant metaphors employed for HIV/AIDS lose their resonance in the Canadian context. The relative lack of exploration of AIDS in the Canadian cultural landscape seems to at least suggest the lack of military metaphoric resonance and possibly a problem with representation within the symbolic framework of Canada. What would be the metaphor for ‘peace keeping’ with AIDS? Surely the closest representation of this relationship is the one that is produced in these texts: the friend or relative caring for and loving the person with AIDS and watching rather helplessly as the person suffers and eventually dies. As the Leonard Cohen example suggests, Canada’s history provides many examples of victimization and erasure. Speculations on cultural productions of meaning aside, both Hay and Highway’s texts clearly link HIV/AIDS and northern Canada.

Hay’s text discusses Northern explorers, inhabitants and history as part of an attempt to define or name Canadian cultural identity as unique and different from the threat of the American cultural virus produced by the consumer and consuming markets of the United States. But the North is also a metaphor for the HIV/AIDS virus, and eventually the North becomes connected almost seamlessly with the section entitled “David”, and the exploration of AIDS and art. The letter that begins this chapter is contained within a “barely readable envelope” (92) and the card inside has nothing on it. In the paragraphs that follow there is an intertwined discussion of various forms of physical deterioration and its mirror image in the art, but it is not until the second break in the text and following five pages of discussion of an unnamed disease that AIDS is named for the first time. Historically, Canadian writers have discussed diseases with negative metaphoric resonances by similarly not naming the disease. Most famously perhaps, Nellie McClung’s early twentieth century Pearl Watson trilogy fails to name the disease of tuberculosis in chapter after chapter of discussions with doctors of symptoms and cures. While all of the symptomology points to tuberculosis, the taboo of naming is not transgressed. Hay seems to follow this historical precedent of silence around a disease with similarly negative metaphoric resonances. A blank card acting as the opening image to the ‘biography’ of David seems significant. In Canadian literary AIDS discourse the writer rarely names the virus, and it is only by varying degrees of unnameability – here the blankness – that signals the unspeakable disease. For David’s family members, David, the artist with AIDS, is already in the past tense: there is no possibility of future rebirth or beauty. When David is talking to the narrator on the phone he says that he is “worried about [his] friends. They all think I’m dead. But I’m not dead” (93). His mother tells the narrator that David “was so brilliant” and that this former state of brilliance makes the present all the more unbearable: “[t]hat’s what’s so hard. To see him now” (93). His mother in fact mirrors his movements and follows David, creating with him a dance of insomnia driven by the disease and in turn creating a new art in the present. When David cannot sleep “… he wanders around and changes everything in the house, writes on things, paints on them, cuts them up and pastes them to things” (93). While David has continued to create from his past art new patterns and images that reflect upon his new state of disease and decline, he is also very aware of the limit to his future creations. David gives the narrator “buttons, embroidery thread, pieces of scrap Christmas paper in a box already full of things he had saved for us. He threw in a handful of change. ‘Do something with them’” (94). David here is gathering together the odds and ends of his life – the little and seemingly insignificant objects he had saved in all probability to make art – but here he is rather thrusting the future potentiality of these objects to become art away from himself and his decline, towards the narrator, who has become in many ways both a receptacle and a mouthpiece for his memory. The section “David” is both a work of art, a narration of David’s art, and also a memorial to the artist’s life. The narrator looks at the pictures on David’s wall of them in Mexico, “bathing our feet in the stream at Palenque, buying tortillas, climbing a ruin” (93). In the two pages that follow, the narrator collects together images, objects, people, places and conversations from her travels in Mexico with David. She concludes these bright memories with a very Mexican juxtaposition of death and life, and in the process transforms David’s death through a creative rebirthing. The narrator first concludes with “For over a year” during their travels together “David had […] deep and vicious boils that wouldn’t go away” (96). And in the final paragraph of this section “One afternoon while he slept outside in a hammock, Alec and I made love in the tent and conceived our daughter. I’ve always thought of David as her guardian angel. Death? As a guardian angel?” (96). Hay here gives no commentary on what or why she has made this connection. She leaves both as questions and unanswered questions, but it seems in her treatment of her relationship with David that she notes everywhere the death and rebirth of his art as something else following the advent of his disease.

While much of the narrative recounts the narrators’ time with David in Mexico during a particular time in his illness, there is from the very beginning of this section a deep and abiding connection between David and the North. The connection is so profound that it is tempting to suggest that the North is an extended metaphor for creating art from the seeming deathscape of AIDS. The second paragraph is the first link between David’s current viral demise and the North. The narrator describes a photograph that “hangs above my desk. One of a series shot in Yellowknife of weeds in water, weeds in snow. This one is weeds in snow. The stems stick up like fine, precise calligraphy: stick legs, his legs, now” (92). Weeds like virus and later the infection in David’s leg “went crazy” (92). And the weeds, the sticks, become David’s legs, withered by the spread of the viral infection. In Atwood, Highway, and Hay – all winners of the highest Canadian honour for fiction, the Governor General’s Award – HIV/AIDS is linked by character to the North. This is a seemingly strange juxtaposition at first glance, in all cases. Why the North? In the case of Hay, the exploration of the North begins with the spread and contamination of white diseases to the first Esquimaux inhabitants and the ever-multiplying crazy slaughter of the life-sustaining animals of the North. Hay goes into the archives and searches for the writings and marginal mentions of the Esquimaux in the grand narratives of the great Canadian explorers of the North. Like the Esquimaux and the slight writings and art created out of the struggle for life in the severest of climates, David’s art and the art that emerges from the infected artist is marginalized in our culture. There is the fear of contamination and the belief that David expresses that he has been forgotten and that others think he is already dead. There is also the connection of his state to madness, a connection also noted in Findley’s portrait of an artist with AIDS, which further condemns the AIDS artist to the margins or even to invisibility. Like the disease, which for most of this memoir is not even named, the work of artists with AIDS lacks a public space, for with a public space there must be the acknowledgement of the beauty and life that also springs from the site of infection. And perhaps above all, as the narrator notes in her fears about bringing her daughter to see David, and her condemnation of herself for her unfounded but nonetheless acknowledged fear, there is a societal desire to look away from AIDS and to forget about the generative qualities of the virus and its possible manifestation in the proliferation of art from the diseased artist. Like the North, marginalized by geography, access, fear and the seeming deadness or nothingness of snow and ice, the AIDS artist is marginalized and secluded within the walled rooms and corridors to which we offer up our sick. Canadian literature has a long history of striving for survival and even taming of nature. The North is perhaps one of the last places where this has not occurred, and, like the North, AIDS represents the unknown and untamed threats to human survival. The very lack of writing about AIDS in Canadian literature supports a theory of marginalization as a result of fear and terror. Even those writers who do speak about AIDS often leave the disease unnamed. While study after study will look at various aspects of the disease from clinical and medical models, the cultural impact of the art and literature that strives to represent the ‘unrepresentable’ has not been the subject of a single study in Northern Literature or even more broadly Canadian Literature.

Hay names the AIDS virus for the first time in relation to David’s uncertainty about the diagnosis and in relation to the art he was making at the time of this liminal state – between the unknown and the condemned. Hay remembers that:

[i]n the months when David suspected he had AIDS but before he knew for sure, he made a series of drawings using black ivory pigment made from burned bones. He set up a tent in his studio, laid pieces of paper inside, used a bellows to blow in the pigment, and allowed it to settle on the paper. He drew on the dust with his fingers. He said he wanted the drawings to resemble the marks left in snow on a tranquil day. (97)

In the early and liminal stages before the diagnosis, he is working in the pigments of the North and using “pigment made from burned bones” (97). But by the end of his illness, ravaged by disease, his mother says that he demolishes everything. And this taking apart or destroying of order and establishing of chaos is the very fear that AIDS represents. There is no cure. There is no barrier against death. There is only the madness and chaos of the unknown. And when the artist genuinely represents this, it induces terror in even those persons closest to the artist, who have witnessed the AIDS journey and the art created and destroyed as a response to the physical attack of disease and threat of death that has been launched on the human body.

Timothy Findley’s Headhunter (1993), while not a text under primary consideration in this paper, provides an interesting starting point for a discussion of subjects associated with the discussion of AIDS in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen. Findley is preoccupied in much of his writing with humanity’s ability to turn away from the suffering of fellow human beings and animals. A number of Findley’s works, including probably most famously The Butterfly Plague, explore the slaughter of the Jews in the holocaust, the turning away from the physically and mentally ill and homosexuals, as well as the wanton destruction of animals. Like the plague of evil and butterflies in The Butterfly Plague, in Headhunter Findley employs the language of plague to describe a bird-related disease that has become deadly to humans, named stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Canadian Literary Representations of HIV/AIDS
• 2 Distancing the Recent Past: New Forms of Discomfort with AIDS in the U.S.
• 3 Mapping Hetero/Homo-sexuality on the Caribbean, Male, HIV Body
• 4 Mapping the HIV Body in Contemporary Latin American Theatre
• 5 Listening to Myself: Politics of AIDS Representation – a Personal Perspective
• 6 Who Dies? Transformations in Derek Jarman’s Last Films
• 7 Within the Limits of the Body: Artistic Images of HIV/AIDS in Spain and its Relation with the Cultural Industry
• 8 The Role of Local Communities in Developing Unique and Effective Intervention Responses to the AIDS Epidemic: Experiences from Thika, Kenya
• 9 Deconstructing and Reconstructing Cultural Representations to Strengthen HIV/AIDS Interventions in Africa
• 10 Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local Empowerment
• 11 AIDS Phobia (aizibing kongjuzheng) and the People who Panic about AIDS (kong’ai zu): The Consequences of HIV Representations in China
• Index